1/25/2011 @ 12:45PM

The Easiest And Hardest Cities For Finding A Job

If you’ve exhausted all other options, relocating can be a smart move for improving your job prospects–but be sure to check where people are hiring, and in what industries before you pack your bags and go.

The scrumptious Cajun cuisine and sweet jazz of New Orleans may make that city seem the perfect place for a fresh start–but the Big Easy is right now the toughest city in the U.S. for finding employment, according to the online job aggregator Indeed.com.

“New Orleans never fully recovered from the Katrina disaster, and tourism hasn’t bounced back,” says Paul Forster, Indeed.com’s chief executive officer and cofounder. “But I think we’ll see some improvement over the next year.”

Indeed.com compiled a list of America’s easiest and hardest cities for finding a job using data collected from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ranking was determined by calculating the number of job postings per thousand people in each major U.S. metropolitan area. The data covers job listings in the fourth quarter of 2010 with salary estimates of $50,000 or more.

The picture this offers does not reflect a precise number of available jobs. An opening can be listed in more than one place and can remain online for a time after it’s filled. Nevertheless, the numbers do present a strong, broad gauge of which cities are the easiest and hardest for finding a job.

Historically, the easiest cities for finding a job thrive on industries that benefit from shifts in the economy or trends, says Forster. And the hardest cities rely on industries that suffer most during economic downturns. The rankings of the easiest and hardest cities for finding jobs confirm his view.

The results show that life is not a beach for job seekers in Miami. The cruise capital may have good air quality, clean drinking water and vast green spaces, but it doesn’t have many openings. According to Indeed.com, Miami had 14 listings for high-paying jobs, per 1,000 residents, over the whole fourth quarter of 2010.

Your chances of finding a job in a colder place like Buffalo or Rochester, N.Y., are just as dim. There were merely 11 job postings for every 1,000 people in those metro areas, which tied for the second hardest place for finding a job.

Don’t lose all hope, though. There are plenty of cities with thousands of high-paying jobs. San Jose, San Francisco and Seattle are three of the top five easiest cities for finding a job.

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose ranks No. 1–but tech geeks are the ones most likely to find employment there with ease.

The area around the city that has dubbed itself “the capital of Silicon Valley” is home to the headquarters of major corporations such as
Adobe Systems
,
Cisco Systems
and
eBay
, as well as esteemed universities like Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, which are notorious for pumping thousands of computer science and engineering graduates into the local job market each year.

“The established tech companies and emerging tech companies are both aggressively searching for talent,” Forster says. “They look for experienced professionals as well as recent college graduates.”

There were approximately 126 listings for high-paying jobs per 1,000 residents in the San Jose metro area for the three months that ended Dec. 31, 2010–but don’t give up if your job search has been fruitless even in the easiest city for finding a job. In the No. 2 and No. 3 spots on the list, Washington and Baltimore also saw heavy recruiting throughout the last quarter of 2010.

The federal government remains a top hiring source in D.C., where there were 116 high-paying job postings per 1,000 people last quarter. Baltimore, which is home to major research institutions and defense-related contractors, has particularly many job opportunities for health care and information technology professionals.

Forster says that after a significant decline in online job postings in 2009, and a sizable increase last year, he expects to see growth again in 2011.